On Tuesday, President Donald Trump pledged to spend “whatever it takes” of his own money to win a second term amid increasing questions about the financial health of his campaign heading into the post-Labor Day sprint.
There’s ample reason to be skeptical of that boast. Mostly because Trump has said it before and, well, he didn’t make entirely good on it.
In the wake of a New York Times story on Monday that reported: “Of the $ 1.1 billion his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $ 800 million has already been spent,” Trump went on a tweetstorm aimed at disputing the report.
“Because of the China Virus, my Campaign, which has raised a lot of money, was forced to spend in order to counter the Fake News reporting about the way we handled it (China Ban, etc.),” he tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “We did, and are doing, a GREAT job, and have a lot of money left over, much more than 2016. Like I did in the 2016 Primaries, if more money is needed, which I doubt it will be, I will put it up!”
Just before heading to Florida on Tuesday, Trump told reporters much the same. “If we needed any more I’d put it up personally like I did in the primaries last time,” he said. “In the 2016 primaries, I put up a lot of money. If I have to, I’ll do it here, but we don’t have to because we have double and maybe even triple what we had a number of years ago.”
That is a claim that bears some further investigating!
There’s no question that Trump put his wealth and his willingness to spend it at the center of his 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination
“By self-funding my campaign, I am not controlled by my donors, special interests or lobbyists,” he posted on Facebook in September 2015. “I am only working for the people of the U.S.!” Throughout the primary campaign, Trump regularly made the point that he was providing all the money his campaign needed, making him free from the “swamp” that sucked in so many of his Republican opponents.
At a rally in Iowa on February 1, he said this:
“You know a lot of times you see these really dumb deals. And you’ll say that’s dumb. It doesn’t make sense. But then when you think, it does make sense because these politicians are representing interests, whether it’s a country or a company, where doing the stupid deals actually makes sense only for that politician and for that company or country. … I’m self-funding my own campaign. It’s my money.”
Even way back then, that statement wasn’t true. Yes, Trump was giving personal money to the campaign. But he was also raising money from individuals: Lots of money!
As PolitiFact noted in early 2016: “Trump’s campaign brought in about $ 19.4 million by the end of 2015. Trump contributed nearly $ 13 million of that himself. Most of the remainder comes from individual contributions, which federal law caps at $ 2,700 per candidate per election.” By May 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Trump had raised $ 48 million, with roughly one-fourth of that money coming from individual contributors.
All told, Trump wound up loaning himself $ 46 million-plus of his own money in his fight to win the Republican nomination. Under pressure from donors who were reluctant to donate to Trump’s general election effort for fear he would use their contributions to repay his own loans to the campaign with their money, the billionaire businessman announced in late June 2016 that he would forgive those loans to the campaign. (The vast majority of those funds appeared to come from Trump’s decision around that same time to liquidate his stock portfolio.)
“After self-funding his primary election, Mr. Trump and the campaign have assembled an exceptional fundraising operation, which in recent days has been overwhelmed with contributions for the Republican Party,” a statement from the campaign released at the time read. (Reminder: He did not self-fund his primary campaign.)
Despite telling anyone who would listen that he would self-fund both the primary (he didn’t) and the general election, Trump began walking back that latter pledge within days of informally securing the party’s nomination. “I will make a decision fairly soon as to that,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in May 2016. “I mean, do I want to sell a couple of buildings and self-fund? I don’t know that I want to do that necessarily, but I really won’t be asking for money for myself, I’ll be asking money for the party.”
Turns out he didn’t! Trump wound up spending a total of $ 66 million of his own money in 2016, meaning that just around $ 20 million came from his pocket during the general election fight against Hillary Clinton. Trump raised $ 339 million total in the general election, meaning that his total personal investment was roughly 6% of the total money he brought in during the fall campaign
How much, you ask, did Trump spend on Trump-owned companies during the campaign? Roughly $ 12 million, according to calculations made by The New York Times. Here’s the key bit from their reporting on that:
“The figures for the final weeks of the campaign…showed that Mr. Trump paid his own companies nearly $ 12 million over the course of the election — reimbursement for flights, hotel stays, meals and services for him and his staff members, as well as office space in the tower he owns on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. His preferred mode of transportation — his private aircraft — made up the largest chunk of money that went back into Trump entities, $ 8.7 million.”
Which, well, yeah.
Look. There’s no question that Trump did dip into his own pocket in 2016. And that he is a billionaire — although there is considerable debate about how many billions he is worth.
But there is also no question that Trump did NOT make good on his boast to a) entirely self-fund his primary or general election campaign in 2016 or b) spend “over $ 100 million in the campaign and I’m prepared to go much higher than that” as he told CNN’s Dana Bash in October 2016.
Which brings me to this headline from Bloomberg News on Tuesday morning: “Trump Weighs Putting Up to $ 100 Million of His Cash Into Race.“
Sound familiar?
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